La Dolce Vita. (12A.)
Directed by Federico Fellini. 1960.
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Alain Cuny, Yvonne Furneaux and Walter Santesso. Black and White. In Italian with subtitles. Part of the BFI Fellini Centenary season 174 mins.
La Dolce Vita is like a small boy romping around gleefully in a playpen while trying to tell you about his profound sense of ennui. Sixty years ago Fellini's sprawling epic about a smooth, suave, sophisticated, gutter journalist (Mastroianni) floating through the decadent circles of Roman society passed for a damning inditement of contemporary moral degradation. Seen today though, this long hot summer of chasing after film stars, going to parties and orgies, eating out on the Via Veneto and never going home before it gets light, looks very much like the time of your life.
Granted, swatting away all the paparazzi must've been tiring and the in-crowd could often be a bit of a bore, but to be young and impossibly handsome in 1960 must've been a hell of a thing, the kind of lightning strike of good fortune that happen maybe five or six times a century – and you still had The Beatles, mini skirts and the whole swinging decade to come. If the same film had been made in 1970 you could its sense of morass would be much more credible.
It's a good compromise choice to lead out a two-month season of Fellini films at the BFI marking the centenary of his birth. La Dolce Vita was the start of his miracle decade (Eight and a Half, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon) and marked the shift from the comparatively well behaved, black and white realist films of the fifties, to the messy, badly behaved films that would earn him the "esque" suffix.
The later surreal colour films had greater visual virtuosity but for a basically realistic film, it is full of beautifully staged set-pieces. His take on the Eternal City is a large white vista of apartment blocks and building sites, a place of flux and change. And in the middle of it all is Mastroianni, working as Fellini's surrogate for the first time and already the master of fiddling with the placement of his sunglasses to get the maximum effect.
Though Scorsese describes it as "The film that conquered the world" and it was a massive hit in North America and across Europe, it can't be called his breakthrough as Fellini was already well established with two Best Foreign film Oscars to his name. It was though a giant leap in scale. Anita Ekberg in the Trevi fountain may be the most iconic image from any of his films but I thought the general critical consensus was that this hadn't dated well. Sometime last year I tried watching it on the small screen and could barely stick with it or keep my eyes open. But on the big screen, crisply restored, is to see a film that has retained every bit of its Wow over the passing of 60 years.
Directed by Federico Fellini. 1960.
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Alain Cuny, Yvonne Furneaux and Walter Santesso. Black and White. In Italian with subtitles. Part of the BFI Fellini Centenary season 174 mins.
La Dolce Vita is like a small boy romping around gleefully in a playpen while trying to tell you about his profound sense of ennui. Sixty years ago Fellini's sprawling epic about a smooth, suave, sophisticated, gutter journalist (Mastroianni) floating through the decadent circles of Roman society passed for a damning inditement of contemporary moral degradation. Seen today though, this long hot summer of chasing after film stars, going to parties and orgies, eating out on the Via Veneto and never going home before it gets light, looks very much like the time of your life.
Granted, swatting away all the paparazzi must've been tiring and the in-crowd could often be a bit of a bore, but to be young and impossibly handsome in 1960 must've been a hell of a thing, the kind of lightning strike of good fortune that happen maybe five or six times a century – and you still had The Beatles, mini skirts and the whole swinging decade to come. If the same film had been made in 1970 you could its sense of morass would be much more credible.
It's a good compromise choice to lead out a two-month season of Fellini films at the BFI marking the centenary of his birth. La Dolce Vita was the start of his miracle decade (Eight and a Half, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon) and marked the shift from the comparatively well behaved, black and white realist films of the fifties, to the messy, badly behaved films that would earn him the "esque" suffix.
The later surreal colour films had greater visual virtuosity but for a basically realistic film, it is full of beautifully staged set-pieces. His take on the Eternal City is a large white vista of apartment blocks and building sites, a place of flux and change. And in the middle of it all is Mastroianni, working as Fellini's surrogate for the first time and already the master of fiddling with the placement of his sunglasses to get the maximum effect.
Though Scorsese describes it as "The film that conquered the world" and it was a massive hit in North America and across Europe, it can't be called his breakthrough as Fellini was already well established with two Best Foreign film Oscars to his name. It was though a giant leap in scale. Anita Ekberg in the Trevi fountain may be the most iconic image from any of his films but I thought the general critical consensus was that this hadn't dated well. Sometime last year I tried watching it on the small screen and could barely stick with it or keep my eyes open. But on the big screen, crisply restored, is to see a film that has retained every bit of its Wow over the passing of 60 years.
